A Pain In The Butt
[Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes] This post is one of those classic double-entendres for which us Brits are (in)famous, involving as it does both an actual Pain In The Butt and a euphemistic one.
CFStringRef and TCFString(s)
[Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes] In the comments on yesterdays initial post in a series following the experiences of porting an Objective-C sample to XE2, a number of people have asked why I didn’t use the TCFString record type in System.Mac.CFUtils to get the CFStringRef references that I required. The reason is embarrassingly simple.
Using History to Make Sense of the Present
[Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes] In a recent post on interop in .NET framework, Jeroen Pluimers wrote “I don’t see COM as the first class citizen it was in the VB6 era.” I always find it funny when the .NET camp start poo-pooing COM and dismissing it as yesterdays technology that some people just can’t seem to let go of (apologies to Jeroen if this was not his intention in this case).
The Emperors New Native
[Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutes] Perhaps this post should be sub-titled: Say a Lie Often Enough and You’ll Start Believing it Yourself Apparently some product called ERPLY (yeah, me neither) now has a “great new FireMonkey native UI”. FireMonkey ? Native UI ? Unless there has been a radical rewrite of FireMonkey in XE3 and the people behind ERPLY have early access to an unfeasibly stable build of XE3 to have created their product using it, this claim is just errant nonsense.
XE2 Update #4 On The Horizon
[Estimated Reading Time: < 1 minutes] The release notes for Update #4 have appeared online, signalling the imminent arrival no doubt of the update itself.
Platform Independence Version Dependencies in the XE2 RTL
[Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes] So I have spent about a week now with XE2 and FireMonkey and thought I would share some of the experience so far. After an initial peek and poke around, the first order of business for me was to migrate some of my existing code to the new RTL. First on the list was my own testing framework which I have been using for a few years now. Something which was on the verge of being ready to expose to the harsh light of day but which I had decided to wait until I had an XE2 (and dare I hope… a cross platform) version before releasing. So this will be the first in a number of posts dealing with specific things that I have run across. First up: Win32/Win64 cross-platform.
RAD STUDIO XE2: Launch Event Report
[Estimated Reading Time: 12 minutes] Today I was fortunate to be present in Auckland at the World Premier of the launch event for RAD Studio XE2. There is so much good to report that I really don’t know where to begin, so apologies if this post is a bit of a disorganised ramble. But here goes.
FinalBuilder/Delphi 64-bit Gotcha… Again !
[Estimated Reading Time: < 1 minutes] As it turns out, simply importing all old 32-bit key values into the Wow6432Node isn’t the complete answer.
FinalBuilder and Delphi: 64-Bit Registry Gotcha
[Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutes] Just a short post to share something I learned the hard way today when moving a FinalBuilder installation from a 32-bit Windows server to a shiny new 64-bit Windows 2008 server on our even shinier new HyperV platform: The 64-bit registry can catch you out.
Something for Delphi to be proud of… in Lion ?!
[Estimated Reading Time: < 1 minutes] Some people often complain loudly and passionately that Delphi needs a garbage collector and that reference counting is not good enough, but if I read this correctly, in the new OS X release – ‘Lion’ – Apple seem to think that reference counting is an improvement over more sophisticated garbage collection techniques.